An M2M communication environment according to the present invention will be described below in brief.
As its appellation implies, Peer-to-Peer (P2P) communication as an example of M2M communication refers to communication between electronic devices. In a broad sense of the term, P2P communication means wired or wireless communication between electronic devices or communication between a human-controlled device and a machine. Recently, P2P communication typically means wireless communication between electronic devices without human intervention.
In the early 1990s when the concept of P2P communication was introduced, P2P communication was regarded merely as remote control or telematics and its market was very limited. However, the past few years have witnessed the rapid development of P2P communication and thus its market has been boosted so much as to attract worldwide interest. Particularly, P2P communication has significantly affected fleet management in Point Of Sales (POS) and security-related application markets, remote monitoring of machines and facilities, operation time measurement of construction machines, and smart metering of automatically measuring heat or electricity consumption. P2P communication will find its applications for various usages in conjunction with legacy mobile communication, ultra-high speed wireless Internet, or low-power communication solutions such as Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi) and Zigbee. Therefore, M2M communication will expand its market to a Business to Consumer (B2C) market beyond a Business to Business (B2B) market.
The term P2P is interchangeably used with Device to Device (D2D), M2M, etc.